


My Loving Vigil Keeping

by highfantastical



Category: Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Slash, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-14 07:56:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/highfantastical/pseuds/highfantastical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Flavian sits up all night with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Loving Vigil Keeping

**Author's Note:**

> Written for speak_me_fair.

The room was dim, with only one lamp burning. Even its little smoke seemed to fill the air -- breathing was difficult; each breath was difficult. His sheets were sticky and clinging with sweat, heavy as earth against his body. An arm came behind and under him, lifting him up as the air itself began to sway -- sliding the clammy nightshirt over his arms and head. As it swept his face, he shivered.

Somehow he was lying flat again, but the pillow felt as though its down were all stuck together in lumps. Somebody was touching his skin with a cloth, wet and warm -- it came in long strokes and seemed to match the reverberations of the bell, because the bell was striking four, again and again disturbing the huge hush of the castle magic. It went to a place deep inside his mind, and continued striking there, even when the only sound in the room was the quiet dip and splash of the cloth going to and fro from the basin; and the little 'tut' and 'mph' sounds which Flavian made, under his breath, whenever he was worried. So it was Flavian, then.

He was certainly not sleeping, but the lids of his eyes were sore, and did not want to open -- the small lamp's glow, inside so much blackness, made his eyes ache and run, like the dreary late melting of ice. It seemed that he was wearing something different, and so Flavian must have dried him off, he supposed -- he had not dried himself, and his skin was not damp. Flavian must have dressed him, but he couldn't remember.

There was a hand in his hair, carding slowly through, and it smelt a little of the tobacco from the billiard room -- which lingered on all the men's clothes and bodies, whether they smoked or not -- and a little of wax, and a little of caramel, and a little of the ordinary brown soap that was made in the sculleries. (His own skin smelt of violets; he bought all his soap from a perfume house in Jermyn Street.) This hand was Flavian's hand, a natural hand, a hand that was wholly there, and as the bell rang out five, and six, and seven, it always came back. It never altogether went away.

~


End file.
